I have not designed any new maps in a very long time. I had some great success with WW4 and NWO and my Explore! game took all of my design time the past few years but since playing the new game Turtledoves War Room 2 an "Aberration Variant" it got me to thinking of a new game theme/design (and that's half the battle!)

What if I took a map of Europe and made it really big, allowing me to put a whole slew of new centers and provinces and sea spaces on. Then load it up with as many European powers I could think of past and present. Kind of taking Aberration and adding the standard powers (plus maybe a few more) maybe a 15-20 player game or so?

We are all familiar with Europe, we all know the basic shape works well with this game of Diplomacy, we are all familiar with these nations of the past and present, I'm thinking this is a good idea. I have done absolutely ZERO work on this, heck the idea came to me as I was typing this. Even if I get this going, my computer is in BAD shape, I can do some work on my old machine but damn, I need a new one. I can afford it, I just have trouble buying something I really only need for diplomacy variants and burning a few CD's. (yes, I still burn cd's and mp3's)

Any ideas, let me have them. So far it's a blank slate with NOTHING in mind for the most partmaybe the Romans, Venetians, Carthaginians,some bible powers? Vikings are cool, Saxons, Moors?

I don't see why it would need to be a mishmash concept like Aberration. Surely you could just pick a time period which had a large number of powers involved and run with that. To pick one off the top of my head... say 1450. France divided between France and Burgundy, Spain divided between Castile and Aragon (which would also have a presence in southern Italy), Italy could have Milan, Venice and Florence, Germany would have Austria, Bohemia, Brandenburg, and a whole bunch of minors that would be nice neutrals to fight over, Eastern Europe would have Poland, Lithuania, Muscovy and Novgorod, Hungary and Serbia in the Balkans, Ottomans and Mamluks in the Middle East... It would be easy to fill all the available slots with plausible powers.

That could work but you have to remember the maps I like to do. WW4 and NWO have huge numbers of players, even the Explore! games always had over 12 players. Bigger is better! Big Europe map, Big number of players, Big time fun.

and seriously, that IS the goalA large map with a lot of powers far more than a more standard game with what, maybe 7 to 10 powers or so? I envision near 20, small for my history of games and while I wouldn't mind more, it would mean a lot of land powers with difficult access to the seas, chaos type builds would be required to allow an inland power to reach say England (or Crete could be a power?). Oh, and it would pretty much require adding the northern portion of Africa no doubt (like the aberration map does)

Not that I'm necessarily wanting to push the time period I just mentioned, but in actual fact you could fit way more powers in it than I mentioned. Portugal, Granada, Morocco, Papal State, Tunis, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Teutonic Knights, Golden Horde, Naples, Switzerland.. Then you could potentially add Persia and Mali and Timbuktu and any number of others if you expand it a bit. Filling 20+ would be easy and all would be historically plausible.

Other time periods would work too. Europe has been divided for most of its history.